CARLOS BONILLA
Despite the fact that Twitter has already promoted some measures to control the spread of hate speech and harassment, such as hiding replies to tweets, and has tightened its rules against harmful conduct, the Australian Internet safety body recently threatened to fine Twitter for failing to combat abuse, saying Elon Musk’s purchase of the network coincided with a rise in “toxicity and hate.” Cybersecurity Commissioner Julie Inman Grant – a former Twitter employee – said the platform is now responsible for one in three online hate speech complaints reported in Australia.
Two years ago Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, announced that he was going to take action. Today language that dehumanizes by age, religion, disability or illness is prohibited. According to Twitter, dehumanizing language increases the risks of offline harm, as some research has shown. “Insults, harassment and other behaviors of this type have an impact on the quality of interactions and can cause users to migrate to other communication environments where they are safer”, according to Sílvia Martínez, director of the Social Media master’s degree: Management and Strategy of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). According to the social network report by The Social Media Family, on Twitter, during the year 2019, only 23.54% of the profiles contributed to the social network with their messages during the last two months, compared to 76.45% of inactive profiles.
These scandalous figures give an idea of the magnitude of migration in this social network, motivated because unlike many of its competitors such as Instagram, the “environment and role development is quite different.” “In general, audiovisual platforms are kinder than textual ones, and although Twitter has integrated audiovisual content at a forced march in recent years, it was born as an eminently textual social network and that is something that gives it a certain character,” according to Ferran Lalueza, professor of Information Sciences and Communication Studies at the UOC. The experts Ferran Lalueza and Sílvia Martínez, both professors at the UOC, offer below some reasons to explain the toxicity of this network.
The limitation of extension in your publications: although it is one of the differentiating elements of this platform since its creation, “it makes the messages disseminated through it tend towards simplification and Manichaeism that excludes nuances, which in turn leads to polarization and a very confrontational radicalized,” says Lalueza.
The call effect: “If trolls and haters or haters abound on a platform, lovers of conflict and harassment feel in their element while those who detest hate speech and malrollism end up leaving the network out of sheer weariness, which causes them to the percentage of toxic users with respect to the total number of users increases substantially”, says Lalueza.
The anonymity of Twitter: this network has traditionally been more permissive than other networks when it comes to censoring certain content and verifying the identity of users, which has given rise to the bad practices of those users who hide behind misunderstood tolerance and anonymity to roam freely on this platform. Profiles verified this 2019 have fallen by 6.6% compared to 2018, according to the report by The Social Media Family.
Since Musk bought the platform last October, he has cut more than 80% of the world’s Twitter staff, including numerous content moderators tasked with weeding down hate speech. Twitter appears to have failed to combat hate, said Inman Grant, who worked in cybersecurity for Twitter after 17 years at Microsoft.